The Spatial Distribution of the Occupy Campaign

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Description

This visualisation offers a different slice of the sample collected for the OII's Leaders and Followers in Online Activism project, discussed in the "'Indignados' a Year Later" and the "Waves and Tides of Online Protests" visualisations. This map is based on a subset of Twitter messages that used variations of #occupy*, for instance, #occupywallstreet (New York) or #occupylsx (London). We inferred city locations from the hashtag endings. When a message used more than one 'city' hashtag, we created links to connect those cities. This map provides an approximation of the structure of collaboration between local activists affiliated to the international Occupy campaign.

The data was collected as a follow up of a previous study by one of the authors on the dynamics of protest recruitment in online networks. We collected Twitter messages that related to the Occupy campaign for the period 30 April to 30 May 2012, using the public API.

This work was done as part of the OII's Leaders and Followers in Online Activism project, funded by Google.

Reference

Gonzalez-Bailon, S., Borge-Holthoefer, J., Rivero, A. and Moreno, Y. (2011) The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment Through an Online Network. Scientific Reports 1, 197. DOI: 10.1038/srep00197